Slums

From about the middle of the 19th century to the present, city neighborhoods inhabited by low-income populations and usually characterized by physical dilapidation have been called slums. The word slum has never been defined officially, even during the decades when “slum clearance” was an essential element of the U.S. urban renewal program. Rather, the term has been used in a flexible manner, with local government agencies specifying which places should be so labeled.

[Page 684]Slums are undesirable places, in part because of the attributes of their residents and in part because slums are supposed to contribute to those attributes. Thus, slums have been identified as “breeding grounds” for disease, crime, family deviance, unemployment, and poverty. While the United Nations speaks these days of “improving the lives of slum dwellers,” and others describe “a planet of slums,” Americans prefer euphemisms when describing their own cities and populations: neighborhoods of concentrated, or ghetto, poverty,Black ghettos or immigrant barrios, or simply the inner or central city and, nowadays, old suburbs. (In fact, the new metropolitan geography increasingly places poor residents in the suburban ring, while many urban core districts have become gentrified.)

Slums need to be understood on two levels—objective and ideological. Objectively, slums represent a spatial expression of social and economic inequality. People who are poor and different from dominant groups in race, ethnicity, or religion are physically concentrated in particular city neighborhoods. The concentration usually involves the interaction of market-driven processes (households with low incomes can afford only the cheapest accommodations in the most dilapidated areas) and sociopolitical processes (“undesirable” populations are prevented from living with dominant groups by means of discrimination and, often, violence).

The variability of the process of spatial concentration over time is noteworthy. For example, Italian and Jewish immigrants were concentrated in slums early in the 20th century but later were dispersed across the urban landscape. African Americans, in contrast, were relatively dispersed in the 19th century and became highly segregated over the course of the 20th century. Today, poor Whites tend to live throughout the suburbs and especially in peripheral metropolitan areas, in contrast to Blacks who are forced into the center and a limited number of declining “inner” suburbs.

On the ideological level, the characteristics of people and places are blurred. People are labeled as slum or ghetto residents and thereby stigmatized. Moreover, the processes that concentrate stigmatized populations and simultaneously create “desirable” places (long characterized as “the inner city” versus “suburbia”) are obfuscated, so that responsibility is shifted from dominant social groups to the subordinate slum dwellers themselves (now called ghetto poor,barrio poor, and the like).

The consequences of the concentration of poor people—now usually people of color—in slum areas is significant. On the one hand, low-income populations weaken the fiscal base of municipal governments. In the U.S. system, where municipalities assume the primary responsibility for providing public services, the result is that low-income slum populations receive relatively inferior services, including inferior schooling. Their ability to escape poverty is accordingly reduced. On the other hand, advocates of slum clearance from the 19th century until today have claimed that the physical dilapidation of slum neighborhoods, and especially large public housing projects, perhaps even create poverty.

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